Question

How do relationships (e.g., family, relationship, friendships) change as you move from developmental stages (think in terms of moving from adolescence into early and/or middle adulthood)?

Answer 1

• An interpersonal relationship is a strong, deep, or close association or acquaintanceship between two or more people that may range from brief to enduring in duration. Like people, relationships change and grow; they may either improve or dissipate over time. The association between two people can be based on various factors;love, solidarity, business, or any other context that requires two (or more) people to interact.
• Interpersonal relationships are dynamic systems that change continuously during their existence. Like living organisms, relationships have a beginning, a lifespan, and an end. They tend to grow and improve gradually as people get to know each other and become closer emotionally, or they gradually deteriorate as people drift apart.
• Till adolescence family is extremely important for the child,as they are dependent for everything on their family.Parents provide food,comfort and other necessary needs for the growing child and even act as problem solvers.
• Teenagers are still figuring out their lives and they do require parental support all the time since they have more knowledge and experience.
• Also friends become extremely important,when one starts going to school.This new interaction with similar age teenagers,shapes up quite lot of personality of the adolescent.This also leads to drifting away from parental supervision as well.
• Early adulthood (approximately ages 18 to 25) is a time of dramatic change. In the face of this variability, most individuals leave their parents’ home for the first time during this period. In many cases, leaving home may represent the first marker in the developmental process of moving from adolescence to adulthood.
• As youth transition out of the home, parents may reduce their levels of control, and offspring may reduce their levels of dependency. As such, home leaving acts as a catalyst toward a more individuated relationship that is based on the mutual care and respect of two adults.
• In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom. Romantic partners, parents, children,all these come first.
• Friendships are unique relationships because unlike family relationships, we choose to enter into them. And unlike other voluntary bonds, like marriages and romantic relationships, they lack a formal structure.
  
• The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to life’s whims in a way more formal relationships aren’t. In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit. You’re stuck with your family, and you’ll prioritize your spouse.
• Throughout life, from grade school to the retirement home, friendship continues to confer health benefits, both mental and physical. But as life accelerates, people’s priorities and responsibilities shift, and friendships are affected, for better, or often, sadly, for worse.
• During young adulthood, friendships become more complex and meaningful. In childhood, friends are mostly other kids who are fun to play with; in adolescence, there’s a lot more self-disclosure and support between friends, but adolescents are still discovering their identity, and learning what it means to be intimate. Their friendships help them do that.
  
• By young adulthood, people are usually a little more secure in themselves, more likely to seek out friends who share their values on the important things, and let the little things be.
• Friendship networks are naturally denser, too, in youth, when most of the people you meet go to your school or live in your town. As people move for school, work, and family, networks spread out. Moving out of town for college gives some people their first taste of this distancing.
• As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship.The time is poured, largely, into jobs and families. Not everyone gets married or has kids, of course, but even those who stay single are likely to see their friendships affected by others’ couplings.
• As they move through life, people make and keep friends in different ways. Some are independent, they make friends wherever they go, and may have more friendly acquaintances than deep friendships.
• Others are discerning, meaning they have a few best friends they stay close with over the years, but the deep investment means that the loss of one of those friends would be devastating.
• The most flexible are the acquisitive people who stay in touch with old friends, but continue to make new ones as they move through the world.
• Middle‐age parents typically maintain close relationships with their grown children who have left home. However, many parents report feeling as if they continue to give more than they receive from their relationships with their children. This can be all the more the case for “sandwich” generation middle‐agers who must also tend to the needs of their own aging parents.
• One issue facing middle adults is that of caring for their aging parents. In some cases, adults, who expected to spend their middle‐age years traveling and enjoying their own children and grandchildren, instead find themselves taking care of their ailing parents.
• Once people retire and their kids have grown up, there seems to be more time for the shared living kind of friendship again.
• People tend to reconnect with old friends they’ve lost touch with. And it seems more urgent to spend time with them,according to socioemotional selectivity theory, toward the end of life, people begin prioritizing experiences that will make them happiest in the moment, including spending time with close friends and family.